"I was coming back from the hospital with my son Peter who was sick. I stepped out of a taxi and there were all these cameras, a whole posse of photographers. As this street is very good for that kind of thing, I thought they were shooting a soap or an episode of Morse or something. But it was me. So I first heard that I had won the Nobel prize for literature from the reporters.

"It is the most glamorous prize, and naturally it has got a lot of prestige, which none of the other prizes have, so it's the icing on the cake. At one point, sometime in the 70s, they [the Nobel academy] didn't like me - they said they didn't - but they seem to have changed their minds. Committees are like that. Of course I didn't expect to get it. I've been on the shortlist for 40 years. It is good to be the 11th woman on the list, I'm only sorry that one of the first or fourth or the fifth wasn't Virginia Woolf. But I don't think it is helpful to talk about writers in terms of male and female. A lot of British writers have won it, which is good. We produce a lot of good writers. I've been talking non-stop all day. I've spoken to my publisher and agent and old friends who rang me up, which was very good. There were lots of people who have wanted me to have it for a long time, so it is very nice that I have. I'm exhausted. To celebrate I'd have to go and buy champagne. I'm going to bed."

Announcing the award yesterday, the Nobel Academy, singled out Lessing's 1962 postmodern feminist masterpiece The Golden Notebook for praise, calling it "a pioneering work" that "belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th-century view of the male-female relationship". The academy's praise for Lessing - and the length of time it had taken for it to materialise - were echoed by other writers yesterday.

The US author Joyce Carol Oates said the prize was long overdue. "It is good of the committee to recognise Lessing's unique achievement though it has come perhaps two or even three decades late."

"I'm delighted she's won - and so she should," said AS Byatt. "When I was in Sweden, someone said she'd never win, so I'm doubly glad." Lessing, she said, was one of the "few prophets" of literature who had "an uncanny instinct for writing about things that are going to be a problem before they come over the horizon - not many writers can do that".

Carmen Callil, co-founder of the feminist publishing house Virago, said it was high time Lessing was recognised by the academy. She said she was "a great writer and also a remarkable woman - the two don't always go together". Callil also dismissed suggestions that Lessing was first and foremost a chronicler of the gender divide. "She has contributed to world literature. I don't know that feminism comes into it."

Over the course of more than half a century, Lessing has used fiction to explore racial, sexual and social divides. She was born in 1919 to British parents in what is now Bakhtaran, Iran, but six years later, the family moved to farm in Southern Rhodesia - now Zimbabwe - an event that would inform much of her work. Although she moved to England in 1949, her first novel, The Grass is Singing, which was published a year later, examined the relationship between a white Rhodesian farmer's wife and her black servant. Africa also formed the backdrop to her semi-autobiographical Children of Violence series of five books spanning 1952 to 1969.

Her outspoken opposition to apartheid in South Africa made her persona non grata there and she was banned from the country between 1956 and 1995. Never afraid to embrace politics, she became a member of the British Communist party in the 50s and campaigned against nuclear weapons.

Her breakthrough as a writer and as a pathfinder of feminism came in 1962 with the publication of The Golden Notebook. The complex, disjointed novel tells the story of Anna Wulf, a novelist suffering from writer's block who tries to make sense of her thoughts and feelings through five notebooks crammed with reflections on Africa, politics, sex, Jungian analysis and dreams.

Her later novels reveal what the academy called a preoccupation with "vision of global catastrophe forcing mankind to return to a more primitive life".

Lessing herself seems less dazzled by her work and the motivations for it. Asked in an interview with the Guardian earlier this year why she wrote, she gave a characteristic reply: "For somebody like me it is something I have to do. I have to do it or I would go crazy. I think this is probably a very neurotic thing I am saying about myself. I cannot not write. That means that, well, something must be wrong with me."